NIGERIA POLITICS NEEDS URGENT HELP

NIGERIA POLITICS NEEDS URGENT HELP

Selfishness, the pursuit of self-interest and self-aggrandisement are the driving forces of Nigerian politicians. From bottom to top and back again, of those emotions, not one is free, not one is clean, not even President Muhammadu Buhari, Nigeria’s widely touted emblem of what is sane and altruistic in the polity.
 In the recently concluded elections, Buhari for instance, left no one in doubt as to the prime status of his ambition to be President again. Even while he is the evident
pillar holding the wobbling structure of his All Progressives Congress and the fact that the strengths and successes that parties make of their programmes are measured by the spread they are able gather countrywide, the President appealed to the electorate in more states than one to vote for him and forget party loyalty if they wished in subsequent elections.

It is doubtful that the treachery in this once and again repeated sentiment sank into most compatriots but regardless of whatever excuse or explanation partisans might attempt to provide, direct suggestions by the President and leader of the ruling party that the electorate may vote for people outside of the APC connotes more than a reborn mind that respects the will of the people.
A fundamental assumption of representative democracy is that each political party has ideals by which it lives and plans for the society it plans to govern and politics in Nigeria has also, once upon a time, lived this reality.
In the Second Republic for example, free education was a fundamental promise of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo-led Unity Party of Nigeria. And that was not just at the federal level, the party obligated itself to provide free and compulsory education for all Nigerian children across the federation. This meant that every state the UPN governed benefitted from free education. If the UPN had won governorship elections in all the 19 states that Nigeria had at the time therefore, all Nigerian children without exception would have acquired basic education with measurable impact on national development. It goes to say that if the APC had a manifesto that prioritises education, Zamfara State would not have presented only 28 pupils for the National Common Entrance Examination into the Unity Schools as it happened in 2018 and Nigeria would possibly have been saved the threat that 13.2 million out of school children poses to its future. But that is a story for another day.